We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kerri McDonald a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kerri, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry

It’s funny because a lot of people will cling on to certain channels or strategies as ‘trends’ that every brand should try. To me, one of the biggest underrated trend in marketing in 2023 is leading with human connection and community building first on all channels and with all campaigns. We’ve seen other trends support this strategy for a long time now – video content out-performing static posts, UGC out-performing brand-made content, educational content out-performing salsey and spammy content etc. Ultimately at the root of all these findings is that human beings are wired to connect and it’s important for brands to lead with connection, relate-ability, and community in all their efforts. When that is done successfully, brands can build more trust and relevancy among all consumers and will easily have a thriving business with maximum organic reach and strong CLTV.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a former Music Teacher, turned Graphic Designer, turned E-Commerce and Marketing Expert. My journey over the last 10 years has been filled with many twists, turns and new learnings that I was very excited to encounter. At my core, I am a highly creative person so naturally, all of my efforts and passions in life have been rooted in creativity. I was led into e-commerce and marketing after being in a job that no longer gave me passion and joy. Along my journey I took risks, put myself out there, learned new skills, tried and failed on multiple business ventures, all of which led me to founding and running a successful marketing agency, The Greenhouse. I’m super proud of what we have been able to build at The Greenhouse. We have a team of 7 uber-creative and passionate e-commerce marketers that create the most amazing work for our clients. We focus on the highest-quality campaigns and have been able to set ourselves apart from our competition by doing so. In just 1.5 years we have worked with over 30 e-commerce brands, helping them generate $50M+ through their email and sms marketing.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I truly believe that assessing and pivoting your path along the way is a crucial strategy for every aspect of business and life. I’ve had many pivots over my careers and business journeys such as: Pivoting from teaching to graphic design, quitting my job to work full-time on my own business, pivoting strategies to grow our business, constantly changing and refining processes for more efficient work flow, the list goes on. It’s really important to constantly be looking at what you are doing and see what changes or tweaks you can make to make things more efficient or operate smoother.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

The Greenhouse did start as a ‘side-hustle’ for both myself and my co-founder while we were working full time. We actually had multiple side-hustles beginning in 2019 until we landed on our now-successful business, The Greenhouse. For us, the pandemic did help to be able to grow our side hustles more. Working from home meant that we had more time at home, so instead of waking up early for an hour or more commute, we were waking up early to learn and work on our business, and then after our jobs we would complete more work on the business. We did this for about 1 year before we quit to go all in on our business. The timeline went something like this: June 2020 – began taking courses and prepping/learning how to build an agency, November 2020 – Filed our LLC and began marketing our business, February 2021 – got our first client, June 2021 – quit our jobs and moved to Florida despite having no clients, July 2021 – re-branded and landed 2 new large clients. I’d say quitting our jobs was the turning point for us in making this business become successful. While working on The Greenhouse as a side-hustle did allow us to build over time and figure many things out, we were too comfortable in our jobs to really push ourselves. Once we quit and our backs were against the wall, we had no choice but to make the business successful. Like one of my previous colleagues told me, the fruit is always out on the limb.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.growwithgreenhouse.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerrikathleen/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerri-mcdonald-ab350045/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kerrrikathleen